Chapter Summary: A pivotal meeting changes the course of two lives and ends another. The Courier finds that the cruelty of the Wasteland can still surprise her.

Chapter 1: The Stranger

It was a cool, clear morning when Boone first laid eyes on the Courier, sitting on the steps of the Dino Dee-lite motel there in Novac. The sniper's shift had just ended and he passed Manny Vargas, the daytime sniper, without a word. Manny stopped trying to talk to his old friend months ago; Boone hadn't said much to anyone else in town, either. He wordlessly worked his night shift at watch, collected his caps, bought food from Cliff, and went back to his room until the sun went down. Until today.

"Morning," the young woman greeted, taking a sip from a cup of coffee.

The sniper stopped and turned his head to look at her blankly. "What?"

"Good. Morning." She gave a friendly smile for emphasis, brushing back her shoulder-length brown hair gently blowing in the morning breeze.

His brow furrowed. "What do you want?" It came out more hostile than he meant it to, his voice rough from lack of use.

Setting down the cup, she stood. "Just passing through. I'm Beth Evans with the Mojave Express. You get many visitors around here?" Her tone was friendly, but business-like.

Normally, he would have brushed off anyone who tried to talk to him, telling them he needed sleep, but something about her made him change course. As he stepped toward her, he eyed her with suspicion through his tinted aviators. "Yeah, but not like you." He scoffed.

"Excuse me?"

He stepped closer to her. "Why are you here?" he demanded, again with more hostility than he intended. There was something out of place about her that drew him in with curiosity. Maybe it was her easy demeanor, the way she greeted him almost as though she knew him. Maybe it was the obviously jury-rigged gun holstered at her side. Maybe it was the Pip-Boy on her arm. Whatever it was, it made him torn between blowing her off or asking her for a favor. He settled on the former. "Just leave me alone."

Her eyebrows drew together in confusion. "I'm just trying to be friendly." Despite his clearly antagonistic demeanor and larger sized frame, she seemed calm and unintimidated, though her right hand hung loose at her side next to her weapon.

"I don't have friends here," he said with disgust.

Stepping down from the stairs, she gave him a half smirk, and retorted, "I'm not from here."

Biting the inside of his cheek, he thought on that for a moment, reconsidering. New in town and with an innocent-looking face, may be she was the perfect person to ask questions, find out information where he had failed to. "No. No, you're not, are you? Maybe you shouldn't go. Not just yet."

"And why is that?" she responded with slight annoyance.

Cautiously, he glanced around to make certain no one was within earshot, then eyed her up and down. "I need someone I can trust. You're a stranger. That's a start. I need you to look into something for me." Pausing to take a deep breath, he continued to scan the area for anyone who might be listening. Leaning in closer to her, he continued, "I don't know if there is anything to find, but I need someone to try. My wife was taken from our home by Legion slavers one night when I was on watch." Had his eyes not been obscured by his sunglasses, she would have seen how bloodshot his eyes were, but the pain in his voice was something he couldn't hide. "They got in and out without me knowing, so someone had to tell them how to stay out of sight. They only took Carla."

She backed up slightly as he drew closer. "You want me to help you track down your wife?"

Shaking his head angrily, he spat out, still keeping his voice low, "My wife's dead. I want the son of a bitch who sold her. I just don't know who it is."

"What do you want me to do?"

"Find the bastard and bring him out in front of the dinosaur while I'm on duty. I work nights. I'll give you my NCR beret. Put it on and it'll be our signal that you're standing with him. I'll take it from there." Over the last thirteen months, he had run through dozens of scenarios of what he would do to the man and this one seemed like the best option, both poetic and discrete. Motherfucker wouldn't even see it coming. The bullet would be the last thing he'd never see.

Watching her face, she seemed to be considering his request carefully. After a moment, she nodded. "Okay, I'll help you."

"Good. I'll make it worth your while." Reaching up, he pulled the beret off his head and handed it to her. "Until this is over, we don't speak again. No one knows I know what happened to my wife. I'd like to keep it that way."

Taking the beret from him, she nodded again and he turned around to walk to his room. "Wait. I didn't get your name."

"Boone," he responded, as he kept walking.

After she heard his door click shut, she sat down on the steps and let out a long breath.

When she had approached him, she had intended to ask him if he had seen a man in a checkered coat come through with some Khans, but he hadn't given her the chance. She was used to strangers opening up to her and asking for favors, but not like this. It felt like there was a stone on her chest and in the pit of her stomach. Having only met him moments before, she was profoundly compelled by his story.

Thoughts were racing through her mind. As a rule, Beth avoided anything to do with the Legion. She had no problem dispatching slavers, in fact she rather enjoyed it, but this wasn't just some band of chemed-up raiders looking to get off and turn a profit. The Legion was large, disciplined, and ruthless. And here in this nowhere place, they had been and they had taken an innocent woman from her home as her husband protected the town. The idea that someone here could have set that up and then had the gall to look this man in the face turned any fear in the pit of her stomach into anger.

It didn't take long to figure out that Carla didn't have many friends in town. None, really. For all her ability to charm Boone, she seemed to rub other people the wrong way. "Whatever," thought Beth. It wasn't her place to judge a dead woman she had never met and it wasn't like she could really blame Carla for hating it here. She had given up the glitz and safety of New Vegas for love and adventure; and this where she ended up: a town with its name taken from a broken pre-war motel sign. She felt like she would have understood Carla better than anyone. After all, she knew first-hand what it was like to leave the protective bubble of home and be thrust into a godforsaken wasteland full of dust and danger. At least Carla had someone there with her. It was hard to do it alone.

No, she couldn't blame Carla for wanting to go home, if she had one to go back to. Besides, the prissiest, most stuck-up bitch in the world didn't deserve what happened to her.

Even with the Courier's careful questioning, though, no one gave any indication that they knew anything. The ones with any opinion claimed to assume Carla had gotten fed up with Novac and taken off, possibly with another man.

The most likely suspect in her disappearance appeared to be Manny Vargas, the daytime sniper. Boone hadn't spoken to him since Carla disappeared, despite their prior close friendship. When Beth talked to him, he didn't mince words when it came to his opinion of his former friend's wife and he confirmed that they did argue shortly before she went missing. He went so far as to say, "When I heard the news, my first thought was that I owe somebody. Big," which while highly suspicious, just wasn't enough to be sure it was him.

Him being on his daytime shift gave her the chance to search his room for anything incriminating. Inside, she found pretty sparse quarters, except for three extra mattresses on the floor, like he shared the room with several people. There was a terminal on the desk, on which she found a note from some friends of his, a group of Great Khans who accompanied some "weasel" named Benny who had stolen a package from a courier. It said they were on their way to Boulder City. "Shit," she thought, having neglected to ask Manny if he had seen a man in a checkered coat come though here, but this had to be him. Idly rubbing her forehead, the reminder of her personal quest intensifying her headache, she processed this new information. While his connection to the man who shot her did not endear her to him, she could find no actual evidence that he had anything to do with what happened to Carla. Beth wasn't about to sentence a man to death on the basis of just a hunch or her own bias. She didn't know Boone, but she did feel that he deserved real answers based on real evidence. Despite the reminder of her main objective, she had made a promise and she intended to keep it.

After speaking to nearly a dozen people, however, she still had no leads and it was getting frustrating. Or maybe Boone was wrong. He hadn't given a lot of details about what he actually knew, after all. Maybe Carla had run off and he convinced himself she was taken against her will out of denial. Perhaps she was back in Vegas, hanging off some other handsome soldier's arm. Yet, a feeling in Beth's gut told her that wasn't right, that there was really something here. Desperation made this man reach out and ask a total stranger for help. The need for answers clearly burned inside him. If he had made up some story to comfort himself, even subconsciously, he wouldn't have asked someone to find the truth. No, someone in this town knew something and she was going to find out who.

She leaned against the back wall of the motel with a sigh and considered what to do. The sun would be going down soon and she was no closer to finding answers.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw someone staggering towards her, an old man in ragged clothes. Speaking to him, she very quickly picked up that he wasn't "playing with a full Caravan deck," as they say. Through all his muddled ramblings about chupacabras and commie ghosts, she did manage to piece together that he may have seen Carla taken that night. "Shadowy folk" had gone into the house and one of them went into the hotel lobby afterwards. Maybe it was just the delusional thoughts of a crazy old man who had one too many radscorpion stings to the head, but it was the only lead she had. Further investigation would have to wait until Jeannie May, the owner of the motel, closed up for the night, which should be soon.

The Courier went back to leaning against the wall, not wanting Boone to see her just standing around ideally when he came out to go to his post. The pain in her head was getting worse again. Pulling out a dose of med-x from her pocket that she had swiped from Manny's medicine cabinet, she made sure no one was around, then injected it into her arm. Breathing slowly as some of the pain subsided, she put the now empty syringe back in her pocket.

It wasn't long before she heard the click of a door opening and closing, then keys jingling. The old woman walked past, giving a nod and an "Evening," as she walked away from the motel toward a nearby house. Once Beth figured the area was clear and Jennie May wouldn't be coming back, she snuck up to the lobby door, popping the lock in seconds with her lock picks and shutting the door behind her.

The room was dark, but switching on the lights would draw attention, so she clicked on her Pip-Boy's light and started to take a look around. She had no idea what she was even looking for. A diary maybe? Nothing in the papers on the desk, or the folders on the side table, or the file cabinets. Then she spotted something on the floor behind the desk: a safe. Beth liked safes and there hadn't been one for a long time that she hadn't been able to crack. This one was no exception. As expected, there was a small amount of money inside, a 9mm, and then, at the bottom, a note. "Bill of Sale. What the fuck?!" she gasped out loud. "A thousand caps for Carla and...oh, god." She covered her mouth with her hand in shock. "Carla was pregnant and they fucking paid extra...oh, my god." She didn't think there was much in this world that could still shock her, but this? Selling a pregnant woman to slavers for some fucking bottle caps.

But why was it in writing? Then the answer showed itself at the bottom: "Payment of an additional five hundred bottle caps will be due pending successful maturation of the fetus, the claim to which shall be guaranteed by possession of this document." Beth's stomach twisted at the words.

She held the paper in her hand for a long minute, still crouched over the open safe, hands slightly trembling. "I can't give him this," she thought. It was too horrible, too disgusting. Did he even know his wife was pregnant? "He can't find out like this."

One thing was certain: Jeannie May was going to have a sniper bullet in her head before the sun came up.

It had been remarkably easy to get the town's self-appointed mayor to the front of Dinky the Dinosaur. A knock on her door and "I need to show you something" was basically all it took. "Trusting old bitch," Beth thought. Most evil people assume that everyone else is just like them and thus they are suspicious. Not Jeannie May Crawford, though: she thought she was in the clear. Maybe she even thought what she did was somehow righteous. Beth resisted the urge to grab her by the throat and put a bullet in her head personally. This wasn't her revenge to take, however; hers would come later. Now was Boone's turn. It wouldn't bring his family back, but she hoped it would give him some peace.

The full moon was bright in the sky, having risen as the sun set, making the red cap easy to spot against the gray ground. Stepping back away from Jeannie May, she looked up to the sniper's nest in the dinosaur's mouth with a nod, but it was too dark inside to see anyone. A moment later, a suppressed shot rang out with a flash of fire and it was over. She stood there breathless for a moment, her heart beating loudly in her ears. Slowly, she made her way through the gate and into the dinosaur, up to the sniper's nest.

He turned to face her as she came in. "That's it, then. How did you know?"

Hesitantly, she pulled the carefully folded piece of paper out of her pocket. "I'm not sure you want to see this."

Before she could say more, he snatched the paper out of her hands and opened it. His eyes studied the words closely, his expression tightening, reading it probably three times before crumpling it in his hands. "I guess I shouldn't be surprised. It'd be like them to keep paperwork," he said bitterly. "Here. This is all I can give." She pulled the beret off her head and handed it back to him as he pressed a bag of bottle caps into her hands. "I think our dealings are done here."

She almost refused the payment, but thought better of it. While she didn't want his money, he was obviously a prideful man and she didn't want him to feel like a charity case. "What will you do now?" she inquired.

Shrugging, he replied, "I don't know. I'm not staying here. Don't see much point in anything right now, except hunting legionaries." Taking a moment to study the Courier, he mused, "Maybe I'll wander, like you."

Before she really had a chance to think about it, she offered, "Come with me. Let's go after the Legion." Then she realized that she actually meant it.

The sniper shook his head and almost looked amused at the idea. "You don't want to do that."

Clearly, he assumed she had no idea what she would be getting herself into, but he didn't know her. "I was thinking we could head to Nelson. Heard the Legion took it over recently. After, you can take off on your own whenever you want."

"Hm...okay. But this isn't gonna end well."

Thank you so much for reading this first chapter. Please feel free to leave me a review and let me know what you think. Subsequent chapters will be less canon-heavy.